What have we done to deserve another found-footage movie? The hand-held technique that seemed so fresh in 1999 with “The Blair Witch Project” long ago wore out its welcome.

The only thing noteworthy about its use in “Project Almanac,” which follows a group of high school misfits who invent a time travel apparatus, is that this isn’t a horror film, but a sci-fi thriller. Used as a means of entry into the lives of these kids, it makes what could have been a fresh send-up of genre conventions as cheap and forgettable as all the rest.

David (Jonny Weston), a handsome social outcast and brilliant scientific mind, finds out he’s been accepted into MIT but with a scholarship that just isn’t enough. While digging through projects done by his late father (an inventor of sorts) to try to find anything of value, he and his little sister stumble across a video recording of David’s seventh birthday party, where they notice a shadowy figure in the mirror in one of the shots: a 17-year-old David.

This mystery leads David and his friends uncover blueprints for a time travel machine and immediately get to work building it. In a somewhat amusing wink to the audience, the characters keep restating that they have to film everything.

The first hour of the film is so relentlessly paced, it feels like it’s on fast-forward. The audience is pummeled with jargon and mostly useless information.

There also are a host of just out-of-date references that only serve to remind that this movie, previously titled “Welcome to Yesterday” has been sitting on the shelf for a year.

These remain despite some last-minute edits that took place after Paramount and Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes took heat for utilizing footage of an actual plane crash in the movie – the 1994 incident at Fairchild Air Force Base when a B-52 bomber crashed during practice for an air show. The wreck claimed four lives.

That’s not to say there aren’t any good ideas here. When the kids finally figure out how to jump back in time, things get pretty fun for a while as they do exactly what you might expect teenagers would do – going back in time a few days to ace a failed chemistry test, stand up to your bully, win some lotto money and so on.

Things take a dark turn when David gets greedy and jumps back in time alone and bad things start happening in the future, but interest wanes as the stakes get higher.

Director Dean Israelite, in his feature debut, proves he has a keen knack for conveying teen pluck, friendships and flirtations, but the found-footage gimmick makes it nearly impossible to evaluate his talents.